Pharmaceutical giant Moderna will be granted $176 million in federal taxpayer funds to develop a “pandemic influenza mRNA-based vaccine,” the Biden Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Tuesday.
The award, which is made through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), will “enable the rapid development of an mRNA vaccine targeted to various influenza virus subtypes, also known as strains, of pandemic potential,” HHS said.
“We have successfully taken lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and used them to better prepare for future public health crises,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in a statement:
As part of that, we continue to develop new vaccines and other tools to help address influenza and bolster our pandemic response capabilities. Importantly, we are doing this work in partnership with some of the nation’s leading scientists and clinicians. The Biden-Harris Administration won’t stop until we have everything we need to prepare for pandemics and other public health emergencies that impact the American public.
A House Judiciary subcommittee, however, recently released a report revealing that the Biden administration “pressured” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “change its procedures, cut corners, and lower agency standards” in order to have the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA shots quickly approved and enable the implementation of mandates, CatholicVote reported.
Amid concerns the Pfizer products were causing injuries to young Americans who were otherwise healthy, federal agencies “mishandled reports of vaccine injury, despite requirements to actively obtain, synthesize, and report feedback on the safety and efficacy of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)” shots, the subcommittee’s report asserted.
The subcommittee took special note of two former FDA scientists, Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause, who ultimately left the agency and “testified … they felt pressure to cut corners on the vaccine review, which was due to outside pressure to provide immediate approval so that the government could mandate vaccines.”
In its own press statement, Moderna said the newly announced award “will support late-stage development for an mRNA-based vaccine to enable the licensure of a pre-pandemic vaccine against H5 influenza virus”:
This subtype of influenza virus causes a highly infectious, severe disease in birds called avian influenza and poses a risk for spillover into the human population. The agreement also includes additional options to prepare and accelerate [a] response to future public health threats.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel touted “mRNA vaccine technology” as offering “advantages in efficacy, speed of development, and production scalability and reliability in addressing infectious disease outbreaks, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The company noted it already initiated a “Phase 1/2 study” in 2023 – one that includes “vaccine candidates against H5 and H7 avian influenza viruses” – in order to “generate safety and immunogenicity data of investigational pandemic influenza vaccine (mRNA-1018) in healthy adults 18 years of age and older.”
Numerous physicians who support medical freedom and a response to infectious disease that does not rely on the controversial shots say a fearmongering campaign regarding bird flu is ramping up as gain-of-function research continues.
“Viruses, animals, and humans” have always been with us, Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), said in comments to Lumen-News. “What’s different now is biowarfare research and awesome molecular biology techniques. Interesting how it was asserted for so long that nature did it with COVID!”
In his “H5N1 (Avian Influenza) Risk Assessment,” scientist and physician Dr. Robert Malone summarized on Tuesday several “key points,” including:
- H5N1 “has been endemic in many parts of the world for decades in a wide variety of bird species. Therefore, this virus cannot be eradicated.”
- Infections with the H5N1 virus “have resulted in the death of millions of domestic birds and thousands of wild birds in the U.S. since January, 2022,” Malone wrote. “A large fraction of the millions of domestic birds that have died were intentionally ‘culled’ (slaughtered and buried) in a futile effort to reduce further spread.”
- “There remains no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission of H5N1,” he continued, with “no human deaths or hospitalizations” having been reported from the current strain.
- Malone explained further the extent of bird flu among humans in the United States:
Per a Nature Magazine News Brief: A dairy worker in Texas was infected and recovered. The worker’s only symptom was eye inflammation and viral levels in their nose were low, suggesting that they don’t have a respiratory infection, according to the CDC. The virus that the worker contracted is closely related to the strains found in dairy cattle in Texas, with one notable distinction: the worker’s variant has a mutation that is linked to more efficient spread in mammals.
- “There is no evidence that the strain of H5N1 currently circulating in North American birds (and cattle) is highly pathogenic or lethal in either cattle, humans or other mammals,” Malone noted.
During a recent interview with One America News’ In Focus with Alison Steinberg, Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist and chief scientific officer at The Wellness Company, observed that researchers at the U.S. Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia, the University of Wisconsin, and Erasmus University in Rotterdam are all currently conducting gain-of-function research on bird flu.
“They are working to increase the host range of the virus in their research,” McCullough said, pointing out that some of the research is being funded by the Gates Foundation.
“They’re trying to get it to spread human to human,” he said, noting that the animals who currently test positive for bird flu “aren’t particularly sick, and we’re seeing no confirmation that they actually have animal fatal influenza pneumonia with the current strain.”
McCullough added the “stated goals” of the gain-of-function research include aiming “to create a human virus and then get ahead of it with bird flu human vaccines.”
“This is dangerous, reckless gain-of-function research,” he said. “It should be banned and shut down all over the world … It was a disaster in the creation of SARS-CoV-2, and they’re trying to create a potential disaster with bird flu.”
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, appeared as a guest recently on Grant Stinchfield’s podcast. Risch concurred that
if there is a bird flu epidemic, it will occur not because it evolved to be epidemic in humans, but because it was made to be epidemic in humans, and the fact that we have a bio weapons industry that is going whole hog, so to speak, on developing toxic, virulent, infectious agents that could create pandemics.
“Our bioweapons industry is responsible for creating the SARS-CoV-2 that created the COVID pandemic,” Risch asserted:
And if they keep working with gain-of-function experiments to make a human infectious version of the bird flu, H5N1, then they’re responsible, and they need to be held to account. We cannot have a society that mass produces toxic agents for the purpose of selling antidotes.
